My love hate relationship with my Kindle

About two years ago my mom asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I had been toying around with the idea of buying a kindle for some time, but I was still on the fence about it. I mean, could I really forsake my huge library for an electronic thing that weighed less than a pound? And could I jusitfy buying books for $9.99 when I could walk to Brown Elephant and buy a paperback for $.25? My library had grown considerably once I figured out that Brown Elephant carried books and when I realized how cheap they were. Soon I was buying books that I hadn't even heard of before! I was addicted. From the summer of 2009 until I got my Kindle in the summer of 2010 I read 17 books. I know that doesn't sound too terribly impressive...but I impressed myself. The problem with reading that many books is that I had to CARRY all of those books, not at the same time mind you, to and from the train everyday. If there was any chance that I could sneak in a bit of reading anywhere I had to make sure that I had the book in my purse, and if there was a possibility that I would finish a book on the way to or from work I had to bring a back up book with me because I can't just sit idle on the train. The day that I realized that I should even consider buying a Kindle was when I was halfway through one massive book. "The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool; Will Somers". This book is OVER 1,000 pages long and it's a bitch to carry around with you everywhere. I felt like I was back in highschool carrying around all of those nonsense text books. So, I started to research and I found that I could get a Kindle for $120 with ads. My boyfriend HATES that it advertises when I put it in sleep mode, but all you have to do is turn it over and "voila" no more ads, but he says it's still like having a big ol' billboard in the house.

Disconnecting

I remember when my family got our first computer. It was Christmas and I must've been about nine, if memory serves me, and my mom and dad did a bait and switch; a sort of box with in a box sort of trickery. I remember screaming and jumping for joy because my family finally had a computer in the house. That computer served us well. I played Oregon Trail and we had dial up internet via AOL. That really was the life.
Then quite a few years later I remember getting my first cell phone. I had just come back from New York where I celebrated my 16th birthday with my family. When I got home my mom had made my favorite dish, one of the things she does well, eggplant parmesan and there was a bag on the table, and then the strangest thing happened. The bag began to ring. I tore through the tissue paper and there was my phone. It was, what we call these days, a "go phone". I had a pre-paid amount of minutes that I could use and when those ran out the phone became, well, a paper weight. But I was still thrilled to have my very own phone. When I moved back to San Antonio from Florida I used my grandparents computer and I would waste many long nights on AIM talking to my friends that literally lived around the corner, but this was before everyone had texting so it was the easiest way to get in touch with someone at 2 in the morning.